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Official narrative

The main responsibilities of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) are to provide legal advice to the police and other investigative agencies during the course of criminal investigations, to decide whether a suspect should face criminal charges following an investigation and to conduct prosecutions both in the magistrates' courts and the Crown Court.

The CPS reported in response to a 2014 FOIA request that a file of Elm Guest House suspects was destroyed on 11 April 2007.[3]

Operation Lydd

The CPS announced in June 2016 that it would not bring any charges in Operation Lydd, a police investigation into the UK government’s role in the March 2004 to kidnap and send to Libya two families (including a pregnant woman and children aged 6 to 12) where they were regularly tortured over a period of 6 years.[4] The CPS sat on a 28,000 page police file for almost two years before they said there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to charge anyone at MI6 over the kidnap and torture of the Belhaj and al-Saadi families.[5]